Over one million workers suffer back injuries each year, three out of four of these injuries occur while an employee is lifting (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1993). Factors that contribute to the risk of injury while lifting include the weight of the object being lifted, the frequency of lifts, duration of the lifting activity, and variables which are individual to the one lifting such as age, sex, body size, state of health and general physical fitness.
With increasing fuel and labor costs and skyrocketing health care costs, back injury prevention is a must to keep a business profitable. Back injury reduction programs instituted for tasks such as manual material handling, when faithfully executed, can significantly reduce the number of back injuries reported on the job. Successful back injury reduction programs combine administrative and engineering controls. Administrative controls include educational programs which teach proper lifting techniques and physical conditioning programs. Engineering controls include improving truck load patterns to position the heaviest loads at optimum lifting positions, equipping trucks with ramps and pull-out shelves and requiring the use of portable handtrucks.
The use of portable handcarts reduces the frequency and duration of lifts. A number of small or loose items can be put into a cart, wheeled to their destination and then unloaded saving many trips to and from the delivery truck. Although the benefits of using a handcart are apparent, these carts are often cumbersome, awkward to deploy and occupy valuable load space in the truck. Collapsible handtrucks can be folded to reduce their size for storage in a nearly full truck. Folding carts have been described that are two sided (U.S. Pat. No. 4,326,731), three-sided (U.S. Pat. No. 3,893,686) or low wagons (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,856,810, 4,878,682 and 4,887,836). Each cart described serves a specific purpose but most suffer from one or more of the disadvantages listed above. Therefore, new, convenient collapsible carts that are lightweight, easy to deploy and take little storage space are always in demand.
The subject invention provides a collapsible cart for transporting bulk goods. In an open position, the cart has vertical side panels and a horizontal floor panel. Each side panel is pivotally attached to two other side panels and the floor panel is pivotally attached to one of the side panels. When the cart is not loaded, it can be folded for storage by pivoting the floor panel toward the side panel to which it is attached and collapsing opposing sides of the cart onto one another.